Trump, One Year In: The 310th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 310 if I am not mistaken. You are not mistaken. I am not mistaken for once. It is a gorgeous day here in the San Juan Islands. It is one of those winter days that we are famous for here where it's actually sunny and beautiful cold. But we are not famous for that. So famous for whether it's a common thing or not. No, not. Yeah, sunny days in the San Juan Islands. 260 sunny days a year is the claim? Something like that. Anyway, it's a claim. It's based largely on wishful thinking and it's a claim that you just made up. No, no, no. It's because we're in the rain shadow of the Olympic mountains. The rain tends to fall out. In fact, pilots describe that there is often a hole in the clouds over the San Juan Islands. It's like you can literally see it. So we are sunnier than the mainland, but not in the mainland. We are sunnier than the mainland, but that doesn't mean that we're in any way famous for sun in the winter because we don't tend to get much. But it has been beautiful the last few days and the rest of the country is about to get walloped and we are sorry for that. Although we have had so much drenching rain for so many weeks that the ground is still spongy and saturated even though it's been sunny for days. But that's the weather report. That's the weather report. It's a new segment here on Dark Horse. It's also the last of this new segment on the weather. For now anyway. Yeah. So here we are Wednesday, January 21st, one month in a winter. So winter is here, not coming. Third of the way finished. Third of the way finished. That's right. And today we are going to talk about where you're into the second Trump presidency. And so we're going to talk about what we thought was going to happen and what's happening and what we like. We don't. And also what the Atlantic predicted would happen if Trump won and where they got it right and wrong. That used to be one of my favorite oceans, but now I just, I have trouble with them. It seems the as an ocean. It seems to have shrunk. I don't know. Yes. Yeah. I do certainly has. Yes. Okay. So we're not going to do a Q and A today, but we've got to watch party going on at locals. And we are going to start as we always do by paying the rent with our three awesome sponsors who make products or offer services that are truly excellent. Go for your first. Whoa. Did not see that coming. Donning the equipment. Our first sponsor this week is brand new to us. It is clear. Our clear is a nasal spray that supports respiratory health. And it's a product that we've been using for quite some time made by a company with which we are well familiar. It's clear that's XL EAR pronounced clear throughout history improvements in sanitation and hygiene have had huge impacts on human longevity and quality of life. More so than traditional medical advances, for instance, when do I know for instance, comma, when doctors started to wash their hands between handling cadavers and helping women give birth, the rate of maternal deaths went way down. Go figure. Yeah, go figure. It seems so obvious in retrospect. But yes. And yet how many things it seems so obvious? Well, seems so obvious. 50 years from now, we are doing. I think it's fine. I shoulder to think. Yes. Breathing, polluted air. Where was that? Sorry. Yes, the deaths went way down after the discovery of hand washing between cadavers and per thing. Breathing, polluted air and drinking tainted water have hugely negative effects on human health. Clean up the air and water and people get healthier. Nasal hygiene often gets overlooked, but consider that the majority of bacteria and viruses that make us sick enter through our mouth and nose. It has become a cultural norm to wash our hands in order to help stop the spread of disease from person to person. But it's rare that you get sick through your hands. Rather, we get sick through our mouth and our nose. Thus, it makes sense that we should be using something that we know blocks bacterial and viral adhesion in the nose. Enter clear. Clear is a nasal spray that contains xylitol, a five carbon sugar alcohol. Our bodies naturally contain five carbon sugars, mostly in the form of ribose and deoxyribose, which are the backbone sugars of RNA and DNA respectively. While most of our dietary sugars have six carbons, sugars like, no, while most of our dietary sugars have six carbons, sugar like glucose and fructose, six carbon sugars like, I'm not the... Yeah, you can re-impost, we'll put the pauses where they go and the intonation. Now, we probably won't. You know what we need? We need the auto-intro. Livestream means there's no post. That's part of the wonder of Livestream. Yes, it really is. Xylitol is known to reduce how sticky bacteria and viruses are to our tissues. In the presence of xylitol bacteria and viruses, including strep, SARS-CoV-2, RSV, don't adhere to our airways nearly as well, which helps our bodies' natural defense mechanisms easily flush them away. Clear is a simple nasal spray that you use morning and evening. It takes just three seconds. It's fast and easy and decidedly healthy. If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you listen to my conversation with Nathan Jones, founder of Clear, on the inside rail in November of 2024, or my conversation with Nate's father, Lawn Jones, osteopath, and inventor of Clear, on how Xylitol interacts with respiratory viruses. That episode was in May of 2025. 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Remember, CrowdHealth is not insurance, opt out. Take your power back. This is how we win. Join CrowdHealth.com. Awesome. Yes. They are truly, truly awesome. All right. We got, mostly we're going to be kind of riffing today. I was prompted to think, you know, a year into the Trump presidency about how he has surprised us in both directions and how he has lived up to expectations and not lived to expectations in part because back when this issue of the Atlantic came out, and it's January, February, 2024, issue a year ago, fully a year before he took office the second time and, you know, more than half a year before it was known that he would win his election. This, the Atlantic put out an issue called if Trump wins, and it's got several short essays by people. And I thought I would do a careful analysis of all of it, and I started looking through it. I just don't really think it's worth it. So I do want to come back to this and, you know, point out a few things in it. But first, I thought maybe, maybe we should start by just reviewing some of what we think is not going right, and then some of what we think is going right, and then go back to the Atlantic and see where we think they didn't did it again. Right. And then I actually want to finish, excuse me, by going back to the essay that I wrote for Natural Selection, it's my sub-stack at the very end of October of 2024, right before the election, called something like why I'm voting for Trump. It's the first time I was doing so, and I felt that it warranted an explanation in the positive as opposed to what so many people were doing on both sides of the political spectrum. They were voting against what they saw as a major threat, and instead of voting for someone. And so I made a number of cases for why I was voting for Trump, and I'd like to also review which of those things I think I got right, and I got wrong at the end. Yes, that essay made quite a stir, as I recall it, people having somebody who's obviously known for careful, thoughtful, compassionate responses to things say out loud, I'm voting for Trump, and here's why making the case for him was, I think, unignorable for people who encountered it in both directions, and those other people who were voting for Trump were super grateful to hear the case made in rigorous terms, and of course other people were dismayed by it. But anyway, quite a good essay, so let's go there. Yeah, let's go there, but we're going to go there at the end. So there's obvious stuff right now that's going on, that's hard to look past, right? I'm going to try to stop doing that. Let me just say it in some reform, and then you pick up on anything and everything you want to pick up on. The three big things that I find reason to be concerned about, Ash, excuse me. More of the aggressive interventionist policy, foreign wars, the generally bombastic and might makes right attitude, everything from Greenland to Venezuela to Iran, maybe what's going on with Israel, all of that. And that includes, right from the beginning, renaming things like the Gulf of Mexico, which was ridiculous, and it's not his right to do so, to the Department of Defense, which I suppose is his right to do so. But come on, it's not a good look, right? And just the Department of Defense makes sense as something that we should have. The Department of War makes us look like what you appear to be making us be becoming. Second large point, unless you want to interject with each of these. Well, actually, I do. As I said at the time, the Gulf of America is an insane thing to have done. It was a deliberate thing. It's a deliberate finger in the eye. But what I said at the time was if he had made this obviously symbolic gesture and called it the Gulf of the Americas, I think it would have actually started a proper discussion of something. Now mind you, I don't need stuff renamed. Symbolic level is not what this is about. But Gulf of the Americas, actually, I think would have been a hint towards some of what we are seeing him do in this hemisphere. Now why he's doing it? We'll get there, I hope. But the, I don't mind the idea that it would be the Gulf of the Americas. In fact, it is the Gulf of the Americas and the Americas are a real thing. And because the Americas are a real thing, that would have been a not excluding anybody. It's not like stealing a Gulf from Mexico, which is obviously not exactly what happened. But the idea that hey, the Americas are a thing. This giant base, it's inside of the Americas and we need to go back to thinking about the Americas as a thing. Maybe not as we once did because our history in Latin America is truly brutal and awful. Yep. Or the United States history. Right. Nonetheless, there are regional considerations, which are important. So anyway, if he had said the Gulf of the Americas, I would have thought, hmm, I didn't think of that. But I'm okay with it. Yeah. America just seemed petty. Yeah, it seems petty. And it sort of, it also returns us. And I think we have said this a year ago when he first made this announcement. You know, it's reminiscent of the very small-minded nature of Americans who've never gone anywhere. And obviously Trump's been all over the place. He's a worldly man. But when the fact that we call ourselves Americans, when we are one country in two continents, each of which are Americas, is revealed when as Americans, and we just, we have no other word for what our national identity is in English. When we travel into Latin America, we are told, no, what do you mean you're calling yourself Americanos? You know, we all are Americanos. We we Ecuadorian or Panamanian or Salvadoran or Chilean, whatever. And interesting that their word for us still doesn't get to perfect specificity. But we are asked to call ourselves not Americanos, North Americans, which is at least a bit more precise. Yeah. And so, you know, this conflation of like, we are America. The United States is America, as opposed to granted the most powerful country within the Americas. But we are one living in a global world, living in the Western hemisphere. We are in the Northern hemisphere as well. But I think your point about what sorts of moves he's making with regard to the the Americas, the Western hemisphere, Masamanos, is an interesting one, an important one. And it suggests that we should be constantly recognizing that we are not the only ones out here. On the Department of War, I would say I'm actually neutral. I don't think, again, I don't think renaming is where we need to be focused. And it obviously, you know, drew a lot of fire to do that. On the other hand, I do think one of the subtle messages of the Trump administration is, we're going to be more honest about what we are doing. I don't think we're being perfectly honest across the board. But to the extent, what is the Department of Defense? Is it always defensive? No. Right. A lot of the time it isn't. And so, at some level, the idea, what this thing does is war, whether we're defending ourselves or aggressing, maybe sometimes an justified way, other times not. But I did have a sort of sense of like, that's a weird flex. But I'm okay with that one. I'm not wild about it, but I'm okay with it. I don't like it, I think, for sort of a more meta reason, which is that it seems to be borrowing directly in this, you know, maybe it is sort of a James Lindsay style point. But it seems to be borrowing directly from the Woke playbook. You know, it's like they got so focused on, I got so focused on trying to get us to change what we thought by changing the words that we were allowed to use. And by spending time, you know, I mean, the most obvious go to example for us because it's personal. And most people won't know it is, you know, summer of 2020, schools have been shut down in March, schools in the West, we're going to be cut down. Gosh, I'm really sorry. Schools were going to be shut down for the 2020-2021 school year, although we didn't know that for sure, that it was going to be the entire school year yet. And the public high school in Portland that Toby was about to start at, he had been graduated from middle school during, you know, COVID lockdowns, knew that part of what it needed to do. It was a big public school with a lot of low income students that if they were going to be doing entirely remote schooling for a while, they were going to need to get computers into the hands of the vast number of students who didn't have them. Or sent in to have that problem. He had a laptop of his own. We weren't suffering in this regard. But a lot of students were going to be in trouble. And the school system already knew that. And instead of focusing on trying to get students, students' laptops that they would need when school started, the entire summer was spent working on how to rename the school. It had been... Woodrow Wilson. It had been Woodrow Wilson High for many, many decades. And it was triumphantly renamed the Ida B. Wells Barnett High School. That was an insane use of resources in time. It was time that needed to be spent actually getting resources into the hands of underprivileged and underserved students, which is exactly what the local left claims to be caring about. And they clearly and patently don't. And it drew the anger and ire of people who had long known this as... I knew a woman whose kids were going there who had gone there herself when she was. She was our age when she was in high school in the 80s. It's like, why are they doing this? What is the point? She was someone who continued to vote blue. So the idea of renaming things that are absolutely fine is a way to waste time and anger people. And I don't think it generally doesn't serve much, much good. Okay. Point taken. I think you're right about the analogy. But again, any move in the direction of more honesty is probably a good thing. Okay. In the broad category of things going on in this presidency that seem questionable at best, item two is that Doge turned out to have been done very badly. The idea of government accountability and government efficiency is obviously fantastic. And we need it. And I think it could have been done well. There would have been a lot of collateral damage no matter what. And we talked about that at the time as we were holding out hope. And I actually, we haven't talked about this. I don't know where you land. But my feeling is it could have been well done. It was not. It was a total shit show really. It took out lots of good people. And it seemed to be in service to political aims when the stated purpose was exactly to get the politics out of these systems and to clean house. And you know, for instance, and we discussed this fairly extensively at the time, it's not just fine and legitimate, but actually a positive to review the ideologically informed grants, for instance, that the Fed is funding at the NIH, at the NSF, at the DOD, the DOW and the DOD, at the Department of War, I guess. So, and try to make them more scientifically, more scientific and less political, that is to say, well, individual grants are given with regard to particular political beliefs made, you know, that the individuals who are decided on grant programs may have the programs that exist are bigger political decisions, and many of them had become either calcified to serve old aims that no longer made sense or worse yet had grown in these just like these crazy ways, such that, for instance, and again, I talked about this at the time, whole degree programs at elite institutions and presumably elsewhere too, but I chased this down at some of the elite institutions, entire degree programs like the MDPHD program at Harvard or effectively entirely funded by the federal government, and yet the degree is that people get, don't say NIH, you know, award degree awarded by the NIH, they say degree awarded by Harvard, and that's dishonest, and it's despicable, honestly. So, I didn't know that, like I thought I knew a lot about what was going on with regard to grants and granting agencies and the programs and how politicized they were and the fact that into higher degree programs had become effectively funded by the federal government is absurd, and we, you know, the curtain was pulled back, we got to see some of that. But instead, like I don't think that there's actually been the follow through and the, you know, the accountability of the universities to actually take responsibility for their own degree programs and not have taxpayers pay not only for science, scientific research, which is a common good, and I will stand for, but to actually stop funding degree programs, I don't think there's been follow through. Instead, what we see are things like Trump demanding that Colombia take a particular stance on Israel or else they lose their funding. That's explicitly political, and I was framed in terms of free speech, but, you know, we didn't get what we were promised. We got something political instead, and it was framed as the anti-political way to clean house, and it was the opposite. So, I definitely feel like I voted for Doge, and then I got something else. And I think the most obvious indicator that this was not what it was billed as is the fact that they failed to do the congressional work necessary to recover anything from them. Yes. So, what that suggests is that this was propaganda, of course, is it better for the government to be efficient? Obviously, how much do we spend on this thing? But if you're not going to get the dividend, then it's not about government efficiency. It's about using the claim of efficiency to go after things you don't like, some of which I also don't like. But I didn't vote for that. What I voted for was let's simplify this, shrink it down, keep the good stuff, get rid of the bad stuff, and spend less on it. And it's like, okay, so I voted for the label on the box, I didn't vote for the contents of the box, even though some of the contents of the box were all right. That's right. And I guess I will say, and I believe I've said this here before, that I personally know people who had not just their research, but their livelihoods extremely badly affected by the way that Doge was enacted, which is to say this. It's quite one thing to look at a grant program and say, you know what? That is either politically motivated, and it's very framing, or the way that it is being manifested has become politically owned. And so we're going to stop that. We're not going to fund those sorts of grants anymore. We're going to take that program off the books and maybe revisit it later, whatever. But I know that they're making something up here. But maybe there's people who've been getting grants in this program for 20 years, and they've begun to build some of their career on the expectation, they will community at grants. Well, too bad. That was federal funding, and the federal government is allowed to decide that those grants are not going to be available with the next grant cycle. What Doge did was it actually took money mid-grant from people, money that had already been promised, money that had already been in the pipeline that people were relying on both to do their research and to live, because one of the things about how academia and specifically academic science is funded is that you might imagine that if you're a professor at Harvard or the University of British Columbia or wherever that Harvard at the University of British Columbia are UBC is a bad example because it's Canadian. But University of Ohio are being paid entirely by the university, they're entirely on salary. Not only is it the rare research professor that is entirely on salary, usually they actually solicit summer salary from their grants, but there are many, many researchers out there who are entirely on what's called soft money, which is to say they're entirely reliant for all of their income on grant money, and they get nothing from the university that they may be affiliated with. And so it can look like they're affiliated with the university, therefore they're getting salary from them, but they may not be. None of this is any of your problem inherently, right, as a taxpayer, but if you are promised a grant that is supposed to be paying out a certain amount through a certain date, and a new administration comes in and says actually all those promises are null and void, and sorry you don't get to pay your mortgage next month, that's not okay. So, you know, promises made should be promises kept, and that's quite different from saying we're not going to fund that sort of thing going forward. Yeah. Okay, so Doge isn't what it seemed, that's the second big, big negative IC in the administration so far, and then this is a big one and can go lots of places. The third of three is the apparent reliance on tech bros, tech optimism, and the unnew on constant brace of algorithms and heuristics that will actually and obviously hurt people. So it feels like we have been forced to embrace a kind of transhumanism that scaled up to an apocalyptic scale. It's juvenile. We're seeing constant conflation of complicated systems with complex systems, and it emerges from that sector of the economy that seems super sophisticated and sciencey to people who aren't thinking about it, and so people trust and they shouldn't. So, here I want to spend just a little bit of time, and I think you, and I'm going to read a little bit from our friend Holly's piece on Pete Hegseth, and then you can riff on this. So, I'm not going to get into the details much, but Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has declared that he is taking a sledgehammer to the oldest DEI program in the federal government, and that's the 8A program. And there's ample evidence to the contrary that the program under attack is while flawed and gameable, not the biggest, the oldest DEI program in the federal government. So, let's see, can you see my screen? No, you cannot. That's not all that surprising. How about now? All right. Okay, so this is an open letter to Secretary Hegseth by on Holly Mathner's sub-stack. I have a PDF here. I'm just going to scroll down to it's a very good piece. I recommend it. We'll link to it, of course, but here's just a section I want to discuss to read and then have you discuss. When you examine Department of War soul sourcing, you will find that from fiscal year 2018 to fiscal year 2024, the Department of War obligated approximately $1.06 trillion through soul source awards to non-8A firms compared with about $19.7 billion to 8A firms. That means that over 98% of soul source Department of War dollars flow to non-8A contractors during this period. So, I haven't even defined what 8A is yet, but just like take it take it at face value for the moment. Hegseth says has said 8A program is the oldest DEI program in the federal government. Here we have a wait a minute. It's less than 2% of Department of War funding. Department of War soul source funding. Soul source funding, yes. Who got that 1.06 trillion in non-8A soul source taxpayer money? Holly writes, mostly the largest primes, Raytheon bowing, Northrop Grumman, and a small handful of other incumbents that face far less scrutiny on their own soul source awards than 8A firms do. 8A soul source contracts require mandatory price negotiation, formal determinations of fair market value, and SBA acceptance of the requirement. By contrast, soul source awards to large primes typically precede without SBA oversight or the same program specific line by line negotiation regime. Cutting 8A does not discipline the largest contractors. It removes one of the few areas where the Department demands exceptional transparency and leverage. 8A soul source awards are tightly constrained and have very real consequences for failure, which is why you will never have to ask President Trump to call an 8A company on the public carpet. Because the 8A program gives the customer the power to choose which contractor they want instead of being forced to take the contractor that wins the bid. It also makes firing 8A firms exceptionally easy. If an 8A screws up, they simply do not get federal work again. And you on Twitter had something to say about this as well. Yeah, I did. And what I will say is this issue is nothing if not complicated. And what I had the sense of watching Hegcess video. First of all, I would have people notice how slickly produced that video is. The transitions, the multiple camera angles. This wasn't a Department of War Secretary who has become angry about 8A and went to the public directly. This is a well-produced piece. And it's clear from the piece that Hegseth has been spun up by something about the idea that this is a DEI program rampant fraud. And there is fraud in the 8A program. It's been established. But is there more fraud than in the rest of the Department of Defense now, wars portfolio? That's a different question. And Holly's point is it's likely to be less. It's likely to be less. Because it has more, so much more legitimate, regular, rigorous oversight. Right. So much in Hegseth statement is actually upside down once you understand how the program works. Now, is there a arguably diversity orientation to the program? Yes. The largest group of grantees are Alaska Natives. We will get back to why that is. Why Alaska Natives are eligible for this 8A program. But the Congress specifically rejected making this specifically about demographics and included an economic justification. So something like the third or fourth largest group of grantees are veterans. These are people who face economic disadvantage and are eligible for this program. So it is an error to portray this as a DEI program in the first place. And unlike much of what we've seen with regard to DEI hires in the workplace, where people apparently don't have skills and don't have the capacity to do the work for which they are hired. As Holly points out, the 8A program is actually constantly assesses the work done. And those contracts that don't turn out to have been effective don't get reestablished. They don't get reupped. Right. Now, why is this so heavily in the direction of Alaska Native grantees? The reason is apparently because the federal government did not want to give Alaska Natives the sovereignty rights that it gave to natives in the lower 48. Why? Because they did not want to fight battles over mineral rights later on. They recognized Alaska as full of minerals that they wanted access to. And so they gave this instead. So instead of reservations. Exactly. So at some level, this is a concession to a group that gave up a tremendous amount. And it does force them into competition in order to get these grants. What I suspect is going on here. And I really don't know. But what I suspect is going on is that other players, big players like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin that stand to gain a great deal if 8A vanishes have portrayed this as a DEI fraudulent anti-meritocratic program in order to get those contracts. That this is galling to them that these smaller players. And you know, there aren't very many small defense contractors outside of this program. This program that allows smaller firms to compete with these larger firms. That's galling to the larger firms. And obviously there's profit to be made if they can be done away with it. So that's what I suspect is going on. But I think headset just doesn't really understand what this program is or how it works. I'm not saying there's no fraud. But I am saying you got to compare what's going on in this program to outside this program. Is it competitive? Yes. Is it is it more fraudulent? Likely no. So those things belong in the discussion. Instead, people have been ramped up over a headline. And it's a mistake. That's it. That's it. All right. There's been a lot right too though in the administration so far. And I think it's it's easy to forget that especially because the right things are their caveats. Right? Like it's it's not it's not far enough. It's not fast enough all of this. But you know, the two big things the two the two big absolutely clear positives that yes could go further and should are basically what's going on at HHS, you know, Maha and Sex and Gender. So with regard to Maha installing Kennedy at HHS and J.A. Baracharya and NIH and several other people in the various relevant agencies are excellent choices and have created and we've seen positive movement. We've seen the childhood of vaccine schedule come into line come closer into line with that of Western Europe. We talked about this last time of the time before at some length and it's you know, to many of us it's not far enough. It's not fast enough. But it's it's huge and there was no indication of us going anything like that direction before now. We've got the food pyramid. It's been changed from a toxic recipe for L. Health to something resembling good advice at any rate. And interestingly with regard to the food pyramid, I'm already seeing things change on grocery store shelves. Like I'm actually I'm actually shocked at the speed with which I am seeing change. So the particular example I'm thinking about is I'm seeing tallow, beef tallow to cook with, sold in glass jars. Yes, it's in it's on the shelves of our excellent food cop here in the island. So just we live on island with less than 10,000 people. And you know, those numbers swell in the summer because it's a beautiful place to come visit. And a lot of people do so. There's destination weddings and just people come and they kayak and they hike and they look at orcas and they buy nicknacks or I don't know what people do. But we have a stable population of less than 10,000 people and a couple of grocery stores and an excellent food co-op. And the fact that you can buy tallow with the food cop isn't all that surprising. Although I don't think I would have seen tallow at a food cop 20 years ago. But still I'm not I'm not too surprised by that. At the larger market on the island, I was looking at you know they've got a like a natural food section and it's not the main part of the market and all of this is true. But they've got not one but multiple brands of tallow to choose between. And that is that is brand new. Like I know I didn't go explicitly looking for tallow two years ago or ten years ago or twenty years ago. But I wasn't looking this time and there it was in among the other cooking fats. And that's that's extraordinary. So I feel like this is a cultural shift that we're living through that has been waiting to happen. Like we were just we were poised on the edge of ready to stop eating crap and even people who didn't know it were ready to embrace change for the good. So I had a clip go somewhat viral from my discussion with Michael Schirmer a week or so ago. I got angry at Michael for failing to understand the degree to which the change in our orientation towards in this case of this clip the COVID shots is not the result of the system working and you know coming to understand things better. It was the result of renegades having forced the system to acknowledge something that was clear and that the system would never have acknowledged had it not been for this end run that we did through podcast land and X more or less. Yeah. This food pyramid thing is a really interesting test case because many of us were already on board with the new food pyramid before it was announced. We had no idea. Well we've been mocking the food pyramid as it stood for years to our course. Right. And I presumably other people had been as well. But I know we explicitly brought it up a couple of times and like look look at this nonsense. You eat like this and you're of course you're going to be unhealthy. Right. But the point is the federal government is last to the party on this. Lots of people were aware that the food pyramid was a terrible guide to health and had re-engineered their own diets. Many other people were listening because many of us have gone around the system and contradicted their advice and explained why and pointed to the evidence and all of that. So I guess my point would be one of the things the Trump administration has done is it has unlocked a understanding of the world that existed but was not allowed into official circles. So this is you know the rebels having you know burst into the institutions and you know Kennedys of course portrayed as a madman and somebody who doesn't understand and somebody who has a vendetta against vaccines or something like this. It's not what's going on and you can see this with the food pyramid. The reason that the tallow showed up in regular markets all of a sudden was that this was just waiting for the officials to finally get on board with the wisdom that had been circulating outside of the institutions for you know a decade or more. Yeah. No I think I think that's exactly right. And I did vote for that. I absolutely voted for that. I mean the Maha part you know there there are a lot of people within Maha who are frustrated that things aren't going fast enough. It's not it doesn't go far enough. It's not fast enough and you know I agree but my goodness like we're seeing changes with regard to Maha that are that we could not have begun to dream of under a standard issue red or any of the current blue team presidential. Yeah it took a rebel. Yeah I want to say though I voted for this style more than just Maha right. Yes. The approach to DEI for example. Yes. There were many of us who understood on the outside that this is this is a hijacking of the system. It's anti-marietic radicates, jeopardizes every single thing that functions and it's got to go. That was well understood by outsiders and now you know it's in the top office and it is it's making positive moves. On the Maha side though I think it is very important to say and maybe this is just more generally a trump. Trump alerted us with his book the art of the deal what his approach to everything was going to be. It is both his greatest strength and his Achilles heel because there are many things that can be renegotiated and you need somebody incredibly bold to pull it off. Somebody has to level a credible threat in order to negotiate for a position that we need to get to that you couldn't get to if you did that things politely. On the other hand there are non-negotiables and I don't think Trump understands that. So what we got on the the Epstein files was Trump changing his position from the one that we voted for and then getting angry at us in the public for not accepting it and his point was look at all the other cool stuff you're getting and the answer is so what this is a a giant question mark until you resolve it. How much influence is this having over the life that we are living? How much influence is this having over the federal government? Until we've nailed that down this is not negotiable it has to be dealt with and you can't give us other stuff in exchange. Yeah so there's a there's a bigger issue that is being obscured by pretending that these are all just interchangeable commodity wins or losses. And I think actually this is going to sound like a non-sequitur it goes back to what we were just talking about but I think it actually plays into this. One of the biggest mainstream media lines of objection to the new food pyramid is about the full fat dairy recommendations. And even though it's become clear that the war on fat that was waged by Kellogg's presumably and other big processed food purveyors that encouraged Americans to be eating carbs, carbs, carbs and to focus less on protein and to be really really worried about fat was was misguided and a problem. And yet obviously an extremely high fat diet is going to contribute to you getting fat like that that is true even though in general fat doesn't make you fat it's all the crap and all the carbs in combination with a little bit of fuel in the form of fat that will go on. It's not clear to me that a high percentage of fat in the diet makes you fat a high amount a high total of that. Yes I did not mean to say I don't I didn't say percentage I did not mean to imply percentage that you know high protein moderate fat low carb diet is your best bet for for health. And but the fat has to be real fat and and all of the food should be real food that's low low processed and you know this is not the place for for whole dietary analysis but with regard to these you know frankly moronic dietitians who are convinced that what you really need is low fat dairy. One thing that I have not one point that I have not seen made in this in this particular place of the argument is the objection that many of us have to low fat dairy is yes in part you are blaming fat for the problems caused by other food stuffs but also the only way to get low fat dairy is to mess with your dairy is to use use modern technical interventions to pull things out of your dairy and I want my food as whole and as close to source as possible. This is part of why I want to be able to to to buy raw dairy right. There is no low fat dairy that has been messed with the some degree. An exception being that you can skim you can natively skim cream off the top of milk not pasteurize it not homogenize it end up with cream over here and lower fat milk over here but that's not any of the dairy that people are arguing about. So the low fat dairy proponents are effectively inherently arguing for the technology. Technologizing of our food which is part of what those of us in Maha are saying actually no thank you also the government doesn't get to tell me that I don't get to eat real food. Before we leave Maha land I just wanted to say that there I am stunned by how much progress has been made and I am dismayed that negotiation seems to be required of Maha also. Yeah. And you know I don't know how Kennedy does it because I know he understands that every time he negotiates something away it means people are going to be maimed because of it right. If if we say well nobody wants to take away your covid shots we just want you to have a choice that means some doctor and parent are going to inject some kid with a covid shot that he doesn't need that's going to result in a radical shortening of his life. So every one of those is a not only a tragedy but it's a it's a crime. And so to have to negotiate in this milieu where everything that you have to give up in order to get these obvious gains is costly in terms of human life and well-being that's a tragic position to have to be in. Many of us wouldn't be able to stomach it and I know it must be very painful to Kennedy to have to do it but thank goodness he's doing it because of the massive savings in life and you know reduced naming of innocent people that will happen as a result of the radical shifts we have seen. So you know I think it's not even a Faustian bargain this is some extreme case that one struggles to find examples that are you know not part of the major tragedies of history where you know I don't know that the representation at the end of the movie Shindler is accurate but where he's lamenting the fact that every item every you know fancy cufflink he had could have been liquidated and used to rescue a few more people and so it's kind of like that right we're in this extreme situation and the idea that negotiation is possible over these things is great in one way because of all of the the hardship that will be avoided but wow is negotiation not where we should be when it comes to human health and well-being it's just it's it's shocking. Yes indeed. The other obvious big positive and I'll return to this a couple of times as we talk about the Atlantic issue on what will happen if Trump wins written two years ago, published two years ago and also my piece as to why I was voted for Trump in this last election is he put out these executive orders early on we talked about them like in day one two three of his presidency that embrace the reality of male and female finally just you know it should have been so simple so obvious I can't believe we got here to this level of confusion where still and I know as we talked about on the livestream last week you've still got people elected officials refusing to say what a man or a woman is claiming that you can you can switch sex if you're a human which you cannot and frankly everyone knows that yeah everyone knows that so either these executive orders state what male and female are reveal the unchanging nature of men or women and downstream of that we see men still trying to force their way into men still trying to force their way into women sports and to women's locker rooms and to women's domestic crisis centers and to women's prisons all of this but that particular scam is being to fail because there was so much now governmental support for reality on this topic that the the scammers that very few of them are actually confused about what they are most of them are scammers trying to get access to something they should have access to and most people are now waking up to the reality that that's them getting away with they shouldn't get away with and and we have we have we shouldn't need anyone to thank for but under Biden and before that even under Obama we had the Obama we had the beginnings to support for this and under Biden we had a full-fledged embrace of the nonsense that is reality deny and and certainly that would have continued under under Trump's competitor Harris yes absolutely and this just simply required somebody willing to endure the slanders that would be hurled back and you know you need a Trump like person to do it right you just need somebody who isn't going to listen to that stuff yeah right and then I guess a third item on my sort of what's what's going right is obviously fraught and it'll come up again here when we go through a few of the things in the Atlantic but you know we have borders for a reason yeah right we we we need borders that are actually defended and obviously conflicts between ice and protesters just getting a lot of media play right now and some of it's very bad and we're going to come back to a story that Rogan mentions that you've responded to on on Twitter but the fact is there are legal ways to come into the country and legal immigrants don't want a legal immigrants here any more than citizens do so this is not an anti-immigration stance this is a if you are actually arguing for no laws or borders whatsoever own it own the fact that you are arguing for the end of the nation state and pro-anarchy or grant that borders exist for a reason and you are going to support the laws to allow people to legally immigrant and not support people who do so illegally yes are we going to do that Rogan peace because it will it will lead to the things I want to say on that time let's yeah we can do that let me just find I wasn't going to do that right oh yeah so okay let's just let's let's let me segue first into so this this January February 24 Atlantic issue of Trump wins is a whole bunch of pieces in it and and I'm not going to really read from any of them except for one on page 24 we have I know the order that numbers go in the specter of family separation by Caitlin Dickerson and this is you know it comes with a terrifying picture of a child a Honduran asylum I didn't send this to Jen so you guys can't see it that well but a Honduran asylum-seeker child being you know terrified perhaps by by border police and you know the piece is uh is terror inducing right and um that is a real a real risk before we show the Rogan video and your response to it though I will say that um the left seems to frankly enjoy the you know the left the left in which I still sometimes feel to be a member seems to enjoy telling stories of family separated at the border by Trump but Democratic presidents have presided under um separations quite a lot as well and they never tell those stories so there's a political slant to which stories they do and do not want to tell even when the stories sound identical so there's a dishonesty in the reporting that said we're talking about right now and there is chaos happening right now and injustice yes so if you would show Jen the Rogan talking about one such story then they start showing up at home depot instead of like looking for gang bangers looking for criminals and cartel members they they go to whatever's easiest pickings so they can get numbers up there's a you know Ed Calderon do you know who he is um he's uh he worked uh he was a Mexican military guy who now is an American citizen but he reports extensively on the cartels and just was telling me some horror stories about ice raids and one of them was they took this guy who'd been brought over here when he was a baby but didn't have American citizenship his family you know came over here legally lived here for 20 years can't speak Spanish they deport them send them to Tijuana can't speak Spanish can't speak Spanish does not speak Spanish he is essentially an American citizen he just never lived anywhere else he just doesn't have the paperwork he's not a criminal they sent him over to Tijuana and now he has to live in Mexico he he doesn't know what the fuck to do he's on streets there's no idea it doesn't have any money so i i responded to this because yeah you want to show my my tweet i said i have been vocal about my concerns with respect to illegal immigration and my sympathy has rightly or wrongly been limited for people who broke the law to enter we can't give illegal immigrants an advantage over those who chose to abide by the law needless to say i have zero tolerance for any illegal alien who has broken important laws within the country but a person who was brought here as a minor especially a baby is a different matter entirely such people didn't break the law and deporting such a person once they have grown within our country and our culture is inhumane i did not vote for that and i should it should obviously stop along with the harassment of citizens who don't happen to be carrying their papers this is out of control yeah so the so the you know the straw man response i don't know but the straw man the response from the other side will be but birthright citizenship creates a gameable set of conditions wherein you know rich Russian women come over here just to give birth to their kids get citizenship right i am aware of that and in fact the response to my tweet shocked me because basically people who voted for Trump as i did are largely of a mindset that this has gone too far and we have to have no compassion whatsoever and my point is look i'm actually with you farther than you think yeah my feeling is there are lots of productive illegal aliens in the country and my sympathy for them is truly limited because we have lots of people who'd like to come into the country and are trying to do it legally and to have a system where you know we look at individual stories and uh you know try to make exception my feeling is no we should figure out how much immigration is good for the country that should be our litmus test is it good for the country we should set that number and we should have a uh a process that works well and then we should have zero tolerance for anybody who does otherwise do i think children who are born here ought to stay if their parents are being deported no i actually think irrespective of what the law currently says and the difficulty of getting the law to be what it is the parents should be deported if they broke the law and the family should be kept together and they should be deported in a humane way but they should go this is a different case yeah this is a special case in which somebody did not break the law somebody brought over as a baby did not have a choice in this their parents broke the law they apparently are not law breaking and are therefore presumably productive in the country and there can't be that many cases of this so my point is if you don't see that this is a different situation then you're not thinking very hard this is a person that is inhumane to send somebody to a country where they don't speak the language and you know have them fend for themselves that's not a rational policy and we're better than that so anyway my feeling is in the truly rare exceptions where somebody didn't break the law but is here illegally that is that does not fall within the policy further so i agree with that but isn't um isn't that going to be the case for all children who were brought over who who didn't become criminals well none of the children who were brought over broke the law by being brought over yes but first of all if you were brought over at 15 that's a very different situation because you have your home culture yeah if you're brought over at two my feeling is if you haven't breaking the law while you're here and you're brought over at two that's the answer and it's not that big a population that we have to worry about it where the argument has to do with what humans are right that that we are the products of our environment and if you're culturally American sending you back to mexico because you were ethnically mexico is cruel and inhuman yeah it's not really back is the point it's it's back in one regard and not in the one that matters primarily so it's inhumane let me just say i have one question about the story as Joe reports it which is that people coming over from somewhere in Latin America and bringing their baby with them uh we're we're already English speakers because how else does this young man not speak any Spanish well i wondered about that too i don't know and i you know we don't know if the story is right but given the facts of the story i mean it doesn't really even matter from the point of view of my interaction with the people who disagreed with me because it all proceeds from the assumption that the story is basically right and there are people who say yeah doesn't matter and then there's me saying yeah it does matter and we're better than that so anyway i would ask everybody first of all if you're yelling at me about immigration like really didn't i invest a bunch to make it clear that there was a huge freaking immigration problem coming up through central america and not not entirely Latin americans either yeah we had people from the middle east we had a huge number of people from china and i do wonder why did that story go i mean you you and zack went down there uh along with with several other people and uh and did amazing reporting on the the chinese camps uh all these people come in into the us illegally from china and i haven't ever seen that in the mainstream media yeah i don't i don't see it in in this uh wave of deportations and i just have to wonder it seems to me that that would you know i'm very much uh of a mindset that we have to prioritize people who are rampantly breaking our laws after illegally immigrating but in light of where china sits with respect to us and the apparent bias in the direction of military aged males i think we have to be very concerned about what it was that zack and i witnessed and it has to be dealt with and the idea that trump is not dealing with it doesn't make any sense to me yeah it would be a political win yeah it would be the obviously right thing from the point of view of the security of the country it would be symbolic yeah no one has one of the things that you guys reported at the time was that in the latin american camps you were seeing families yeah and not that you know the the faces of deportation of criminal people here illegally are are you know dudes from latin american gangs all tied it up and looking like bad asses but families are families and in the camp that was filled with chinese people you weren't seeing families you were seeing young men of military age and you know young men of military age don't come in on mass and create honest lives for themselves typically whereas families do and i'm you know this is not an argument for illegal immigration it is an observation about the distinct uh behavioral futures of the demographics of families versus a bunch of single men of military age yeah i mean they're just obviously ought to be priorities and yes we should deport people who came illegally across the border even if their families and the adults are working productively however we ought to be prioritizing people who are a military threat to the country and i'm not saying every chinese person who came across the border is but that certainly was a potential element yeah and you know we left the border open do we really think our our enemies abroad didn't exploit that we should be looking for the people who are most likely to be in the that hostile group and i anecdotally will just say we experienced nothing but hostility in the chinese camp in daryan yeah it was decidedly hostile which i can't say china china is a different culture but if i were picking up my life and i were moving from china to the u.s i would be very curious about americans i wouldn't be hostile to them so that was exactly two years ago i was i believe that was january of 2024 that's not that long ago yeah so anyway there's something there's something off about the fact that that does not show up prominently i can't figure out why trump wouldn't do it because even if it were purely symbolic it would be a win for him absolutely okay so the Atlantic sort of nominally god that one right you know the concern about the specter of family separation maybe not frame that way but you know is there is there chaos and brutality happening there is on page 20 we have america will abandon NATO a prediction no that hasn't happened but to be fair the national defense authorization act for physically your 2024 which was enacted the variant of 2023 presumably after this issue of the Atlantic went to press makes it very very difficult to do so so it's not that trump didn't necessarily want to and as i'm spoken about separatists from NATO a lot but it became very very difficult so wrong but but with with a big caveat on page 29 we have of this two year old if trump wins issue of the Atlantic women will be targets and it's just it's the same it's the same stuff right like he's he's gross and he says gross things about women and he encourages grossness in influencers and gives credence to the manosphere and helps create a culture of grossness and young men all of which is kind of true but as i said in that why i am voting for trump piece which will come back to shortly he is absolutely net positive for women 100 percent because saying mean things and gross things about women is bad okay cool but if you think that's more bad than protecting the safety and dignity of women and girls across the board is good then i don't even know what universe you're living it like you have just completely failed to understand the risks the women and girls actually face and and you know if having mean things said to you or about you is the highest bar that you can imagine for bad things that can happen you've been living in a really sheltered world and you should get out more yeah okay so that's you know wrong we have on the next page and you know i'm skipping a bunch of them but we have climate denial will flourish well it would be really really fantastic we could take politics out of the science and actually actually fun and encourage scientists to do research that might come up with different answers and not be forced to then slide those answers under the carpet and pretend they never did the research because is our climate changing yeah it is is it anthropogenic partially sure probably to what degree are the changes that we're seeing anthropogenic we don't know because we haven't been allowed people who do this kind of science hasn't been allowed to do the work that would actually find those questions out most of the work is model base which means you feed in your assumptions and you get your assumptions out the other end and you claim that's results and what we do know for sure is that there's a lot going on on our planet that is changing our climate that has nothing to do with us and we're not allowed to talk about that either so climate denial will flourish how about you people on the left start actually thinking scientifically and learn what it might mean to assess what the climate changing means and how it is changing in the way yeah 100% agree there there is climate change but we have bigger dangers and what we don't have is science capable of telling us how significant anthropogenic climate change is yeah there's a lot it's not that we don't have the capacity as a species it's that we're not being allowed to do it no and you know we've got science it's only allowed to reach one conclusion yeah so that's not science that's not science um on the next page we have and I'll just put this up is journalism ready not if you're at the Atlantic like nope because you stopped doing journalism guys this is on you like start journalism again consider that consider that and then watch your audience come back like that'll be amazing for you you'll actually grow your subscription again if you actually start doing journalism is journalism ready no because you stopped doing it journalism is dead but that's not on us who are questioning what you're saying it's because you're not doing journalism majata make journalism a thing again a thing again yes good um next page man they really they really got going uh when science becomes a slogan can you imagine the people at the Atlantic who brought us the most biased and crappy so-called science reporting during COVID of any of the major players like even the New York Times could not hold a candle to the Atlantic with regard to the really ask backwards reporting on COVID is science when science becomes a slogan yeah you did that that was you and so you know do you have a problem on the right where a lot of people I don't know my right on the right where a lot of people are saying screw it no more science for me I'm out because science keeps lying to me yeah that's a problem you know why because you have people on the left going I follow the science in this house we believe in science and you don't you believe in authorities in lab coats and nice grants and fancy degrees telling you what to do because you like to follow instructions that's not science it never has been so you've got the abuse of science on the left and the rejection of bad science on the right and there are still a bunch of us out here going like actually guys we're gonna need the science we're gonna need to be able to do science all of us should be able to think scientifically and we can but not when you have this stupid insane war between reject all science because it sounds like that and accept all science except I don't know what science is and I'm accepting something that isn't science after all so like when science becomes a slogan how dare you a bunch of nincompoops yeah totally a bunch of nincompoops um okay uh I'm gonna skip a few because it's just too many um you know I skipped too far 40 page 43 a plan to outlaw abortion everywhere nope that was never his plan does he is are there some people in the United States who would like to outlaw abortion everywhere yeah of course there are there always will be that was never Trump's interest I don't know that he actually cared at all about Roe v Wade I don't know that he cared about that issue at all was he pandering to some degree to his constituents but also listing to many constitutional law experts who said that's bad law that's not gonna stay on the books forever no matter what and you're gonna need to send it back to the states I don't know what his justification was in his first term for putting the people on the court that he did and knowing that that would end up overturning Roe but it wasn't that he was gunning for abortion he he really I believe was interested in sending it back to the states and does that mean that in some states it's now very very difficult if not impossible for him to get an abortion and it wasn't nearly as difficult if not impossible before yes but good people who know the law say that Roe was bad law and that is actually distinct from the question of whether or not you feel that it should be your right to have an abortion and and when and so you know again we have you know some people on the right having a very extreme position and some extremely vocal people on the left having an extreme position that is frankly disgusting to almost everyone to hear and that's not helping yeah the idea that you should be able to have an abortion until the moment before you give birth at your whim is is reprehensible to basically all human beings and the idea that you would celebrate an abortion no no no no one reasonable celebrates such a thing and yet you know I I feel that it should be a right early on for you know for for women but I don't think that any normal human being would be celebrating such a choice if they had to make it if they felt that they have to make it so nope Atlantic wrong on this if Trump gets into office a second time this again published two years before now there will be a planned outlaw abortion everywhere wrong okay so it goes on and on but the one the one of these that I want to read a little bit from seems to me kind of the encapsulation of this what I insist on calling the pseudo liberal mindset that has helped us arrive in a place where the Atlantic could publish so many things they got it right in a few places but a lot wrong even a broken magazine has write a couple times of well the the Ann Abelbaum piece on NATO was I think right in spirit and and I can't remember who wrote about you know the specter of family separation Caitlin Dickerson and there are some other pieces that yeah right but in part what has happened and I am not the first to say this but I have been saying it for a long time is that we have placed the neuroses of women front and center in the American consciousness and that doesn't mean that we've placed women's interests front and center far far far from it we have placed the neuroses of women who are interested in being vocal and active front and center and allowed those neuroses to triumph over reality and my line of evidence here is this piece on page 60 of this Atlantic issue from two years ago predicting what would happen if Trump wins it's called the psychic toll by Jennifer senior just gonna read a few paragraphs there were times during the first two years of the Biden presidency when I came close to forgetting about it all the taunts and the provocations the incitements and the resentments the dis orchestrated reasoning the verbal incontinence the press conferences fueled by megalomedia vengeance and a soups off hydro I've I'm gonna have to read that one again because it's good I'm gonna start over yeah yeah there were times during the first two years of the Biden presidency when I came close to forgetting about it all the taunts and the provocations the incitements and the resentments the dis orchestrated reasoning the verbal incontinence the press conferences fueled by megalomedia vengeance and a soups on a hydroxychloroquine I forgot almost that we'd had a man in the White House who governed by tweet I forgot that the news cycle had shrunk down to microseconds I forgot even that we had a president with a personality so disordered and a mind so dysregulated this being a central irony that our nation's top executive had zero executive function that the generals around have had to choose between carrying out presidential orders and upholding the constitution I forgot in short that I'd spent nearly five years scanning the velled for threats indulging in the most neurotic form of magical thinking convinced that my monitoring of Twitter alone was what stood between Trump and national ruin just as Erica John believed that her concentration of vigilance were what kept her flight from plunging into the sea say what you want about Joe Biden he's allowed us to go days at a time without remembering he's there but now here we are faced with the prospect of a Trump restoration we've already seen the cruelty and chaos that having a malignant narcissist in the oval office entails what will happen to the American psyche if he wins again what will happen if we have to live in fight or flight mode for four more years and possibly far beyond this is on you okay your neurosis is your problem neuroticism is more common in women than in men it's one of the big five personality traits and it's one of the things that is highly sexed okay full disclosure this is one of many places that I myself am gender nonconforming I both have extremely low neuroses and have very little patience for it and other people so my reaction to this is kind of extreme I simply have no patience for your bullshit your anxiety your neuroticism is a you problem not a rest of us problem and we have our entire culture has been turned into a the neuroses of some women have become the problem of the rest of us and it's insane it's it's just insane so just the neuroticism is broadly broadly speaking having a negative reaction to events as they happen tending towards negative emotions rather than positive ones so things like fear anxiety anger and sadness people high neuroticism are more likely to have negative interpretations of events of events greater difficulty dealing with stress they're more likely to lash out at others and conclude that ordinary situations are impossible or untenable so of course women who are on average higher in neuroticism are going to be more likely to view what they already see as a negative as world ending the sky is falling but it's in their power your power you were the individual who's experiencing this it is in your power to reframe your response to it and that doesn't mean that you may not want to make change in the world but your neuroticism enough that it actually shows up in the Atlantic's issue about what will happen if Trump wins we're all going to have a psychic told we're all going to be neurotic no we're not even those of us who are displeased with what is playing out and don't like a lot of what is happening can do so without the anxiety and the fear and the anger and the frankly insanity that you are inflicting on the rest of us you aren't allowed to make a you problem and are problem and yet you're doing it and it is our not just response it is not just our right but our responsibility to resist your neuroticism from taking over more beautifully said I would also just point out that that little bit at the end where she points out that underbiting it was possible to just relax and not think about these things yeah this is the problem with being governed by neuroticism is that it's what you've decided to freak out about and the fact that you weren't freaked out about a demented president sitting in the White House with the capacity to launch nuclear weapons presumably because somebody else wants them launched and he doesn't know enough to say no everything that happened over COVID under the Biden administration you're choosing to freak out about this thing because somebody's wound you up over it yeah you're choosing not to freak out about this other thing and you you have to compare them right when it came to Joe Biden there wasn't much there there he was gone and you can tell you just look at a comparison between his speeches at the end of his presidency and compare them to Joe Biden from 20 or 30 years ago or 10 even 10 yeah it's obvious what had happened and you chose not to freak out about it so anyway neuroticism is both your reaction and the fact that it's pointed at some things and not others right it's a totally arbitrary and you know we can't live like that as you as you say yeah that's right um so the last thing I want to do is just go through the main points and I just in my original piece why I'm voting for Trump from a year and a half 14 months ago not read the whole piece um but I think I split it up into sort of five main points I have a couple of other things and I don't need to go there yet yeah I have a couple of the things that I wanted to say before we do that right um one is I want to talk a little bit about foreign policy I want to talk about what's going on with Iran and I also want to talk about Venezuela okay now when it comes to Iran this is a place where I absolutely didn't vote for this and I know it I do not feel that it is in the United States interest to attack Iran and it is especially in our interest to avoid going to war with Iran so the bombing raid on Iran seems to have worked the first time without precipitating a wider war on the other hand I remember you know Gulf War one and then I remember the Quagmire in Iraq years later so there's a pattern the Neocons and now the Neon Neocons have Iran on their list it's next it has to go the United States has to fight this war and we're told that it is in our interest and frankly if the Neocons say it is in your interest that's like the CDC telling you how to avoid COVID right it's upside down and backwards the Neocons are not on our team I don't know if that's because they're entirely delusional or they're actually effectively working for somebody else but the point is no war with Iran would be a terrible error and Trump is obviously contemplating it we had a false start last week which I take to have been strategically clever leave the Iranians to think that we're about to attack them so that you can see what their countermeasures look like yes I'm sure that's a wise way to go about conducting a war but the war itself is misguided and we shouldn't go there and I have the feeling this time we're not going to be allowed to say now that the powers that be are going to force this to happen and we the American public don't get to say and that ought to make you think not even Trump I don't know that Trump wants to go to war in Iran but I don't think he has a choice somehow yes now Venezuela I want to say this very carefully what happened in Venezuela I don't know whether I voted for it yeah right because I don't know what it is yeah I know that there was a pretext that I really don't like that this was about interdiction of drugs flowing into the US fentanyl doesn't come from Venezuela no I don't think those speedboats were what did Toby call them ultra rapid fishermen I don't know I'm willing to believe that there's likely something off about those boats but I don't know and we don't kill people based on you know the executive telling us that they're guilty of stuff that's not how we behave so this definitely some uncool stuff that we've done in Venezuela as for and I don't love the idea that we're going to go and kidnap leaders of foreign countries because once you open that particular version of Pandora's box who knows where it stops and what we feel entitled to do but that said yes Venezuela was a total disaster modernity to go yep the Venezuelan people are caught in the middle of something that is clearly much bigger now the question is why did we go after Venezuela did we do it because of oil well I'm persuaded that we probably did but that the picture is likely a geopolitical a global geopolitical question in which Venezuela and our ability to hopefully purchase its oil rather than having that oil flow to China changes the picture of the world radically in the direction of our being safer in the western hemisphere and possibly Taiwan being safer without as big a threat from China the idea is that without access to Venezuelan oil the Chinese can't afford to attack Taiwan we were in danger of being dragged into a conflict that was going to be potentially ruinous in Taiwan and so what I'm saying is I don't know how clear headed this attack was or what it's about it's very undemocratic yep but there is a question that I can't answer but I think it belongs on the table and we be a functioning democratic republic at home and function more in an imperial framework abroad and could we do it humanely in other words you and I have spent I don't know how many years in Latin America we have not only fascination with the place but a great love of numerous cultures there and I I find it tragic actually that our relationship that the American relationship to Latin America has been exploitative and authoritarian just over and over and over again Nicaragua Panama Chile Venezuela and I'm missing many those are those the obvious one right so what I'm hoping is that yes we're going to make some moves that are going to make people thoroughly uncomfortable that they will be made in a way that the populations who have no choice about this that's very anti-democratic but that those populations end up feeling that it was in their interest and positive and to the extent that we have a global real politics situation how how do you deal with the threat of China invading Taiwan I don't know that Venezuela has the effect that people have suggested it does where our control over Venezuela prevents China from attacking Taiwan but if so that may well end up being net positive for planet Earth and I am not definitely for us being a democratic republic at home and us abiding by those principles 100% our constitution I think is incomplete it's got some flaws but overwhelmingly it's the best document on planet Earth and I want us to live by it and we haven't been so that's a problem but am I willing to understand that the world is a more complex place and that the rule set is different abroad and that even our values at home cannot be mapped onto the entire world and then it may end up causing a net decrease in those values being realized across the globe yes I am so yeah if this was well thought out and wise somehow on the Trump administration's part and it ends up working to the advantage of the Venezuelan people who were frankly suffering terribly then I did vote for it if on the other hand this is more bravado and it's going to be turned into you know a vassal state then we're going to extract from them in a way that the population now suffers in a new way under our hegemony then I didn't vote for it yeah so I'd love to know the answer to that question and I don't I agree I agree with everything you said and let me add an anecdote when the year familiar with already which is you know I don't having interacted with people in several of the nation states in Latin America who have suffered because of the interventionist policies the United States in the past I was I watched this with you know some some horror but also with a recognition that at least many I don't I won't claim to know what percentage but at least many Venezuelans had fled Venezuela in recent years because it had become an untenable place to live that first under Hugo Chavez and then under Maduro since 2013 what had once been a country that was coming up to standards of quality of life that were quite high that suddenly not suddenly under Chavez and then under Maduro conditions got worse and worse goods weren't available inflation was rampant corruption was on the rise and there there had been a movement in the right direction and now there was movement in very much the wrong direction and specifically it was 10 years ago actually that we spent 11 weeks Ecuador with our sons and 30 students leading study abroad and when we were in Coenca in Ecuador a colonial Spanish city in in the Andes for a couple of weeks while students did homestays in Spanish language and and we did some day trips and such I met a Venezuelan family who would escape on foot if I remember correctly from Venezuela and had opened up a restaurant I found myself in the restaurant I took you guys back there and I had several conversations with with these people these had been professionals these were and I didn't find my notes I didn't know exactly where we were going to be going here but if memory serves I think you know she was a veterinarian and he was a judge or something like they had been upper middle class professionals in Venezuela and they had an adult a young adult son or daughter as well who was helping run the restaurant who had been in college was just trying to figure out what they were going to be doing in the world and they'd had to escape they felt that they were at risk that they were going to be having their their belongings taken from them because that was the kind of state that Maduro was was creating and he wasn't the first to do so you know he had inherited such a set of policies from Chavez before that so I for 10 years have had this knowledge in me that Venezuela is failing its people and that Maduro was failing its people and failing his people failing Venezuela's people and that it would be better for Venezuela's were under a different kind of leadership I don't know if this is this is the way to do it it certainly feels that abducting the leaders of other states is a bridge too far what that doesn't mean that this won't be net positive for the people of Venezuela right I would agree yeah did you have more nope I think I think that's it we're gonna go to uh oh yeah your piece and then I have one thing at the end okay fair enough um okay so in can you see my screen awesome amazing well wonders never sees uh in on October 29th of 2024 about a week before the election I posted why I am voting for Trump and I'm proud to do so it was by far my most engaged and appreciated piece on my sub stack which is maybe should have been obvious that was coming but I didn't I didn't see it coming you know I I rather like my piece on starfish but somehow it didn't get back as much engagement um so you know I begin just this way I'm not going to read the whole piece at all but eight years ago I couldn't imagine that I ever vote for Trump four years ago I considered it but opted against voting third party instead vote for Tulsi Gabbard this year I am voting for Trump there are many Americans who have followed a similar path last week's dark course made a case for Trump but I'm still met with dismay and disbelief by some family and friends increasingly what I hear is this I understand that you can't possibly vote for Kamala but what are the reasons to vote for Trump here is one set of answers uh so I'm just gonna go through the main categories first and then work back up to um to point out where I think I got it either I got it wrong or right or maybe I had it right at the time but conditions have changed the first one was Trump is not owned the second is Trump is taking counsel from truth speaking patriots the third broad reason is Trump is better for Americans Trump is better for women and finally Trump is better for America and for its core values so in reverse order is Trump better than the than the alternative over in team blue for America and for its core values I still say net yes uh I don't even think this is close in light of the fact that we had a non-president followed by a candidate who wasn't supported by anybody and was an empty shirt well and one of one of my pieces of evidence here in advance of the election is that the Biden administration literally formed a ministry of truth short lived though it was its formal name was the disinformation governance board the Biden administration defined it took a stand on misdiss and malinformation definitions currently housed at the side of the cyber security infrastructure security agency and I and I named them so you know the evidence is is there and this is this is a place where although I didn't point out how Trump has been positive in this regard because I don't think there have been any executive orders or explicit places um the you know the standing against DEI and wokeness is just the tip of the iceberg with regard to actually standing up for our constitution and you know the first amendment is is a key piece that obviously he's better than the opposition so that was that was the last of my reasons and still stands Trump is better for women yes we already talked about this um but uh you know the the the recognition that male and female are real categories uh that can't get turned into the other in mammals uh and that uh you know allowing men in address into a domestic crisis center or a prison is barbaric is obvious and somehow team blue didn't get that uh so I would argue on the substance he is leaps and bounds better absolutely what is being responded to is pure symbolic stuff and you know so I made a point in this piece of not saying anything about Harris but not like it was it was just too easy but like you know there was so much being written then about what an incompetent no nothing she was but I remember Brat Summer right so this was you know this sort of hapless vapid banal embrace of the lowest form of female sexuality as a stand-in for an embrace of womanhood and femininity if that's good for women I'm done I'm not interested so yes um not interested in uh in being in on the private conversations trump has with his bros about women I'm sure they're gross but um on the substance it's way better for women so that's two two points uh on which I believe I was correct uh the this one trump is better for Americans um this is a little bit more nuanced right there's um there's the border there's border protection there's prices uh you know the primary doesn't really falling like we expected it would um you know inflation is still bad there's you know there's a lot of people still suffering I think less than they were under Biden but uh but this is a mixed back well I think we don't know I think we don't know I think we don't know yet but the Venezuela move which may be depending upon what it was could be thoroughly unjustified would still I think be net positive for Americans the amount of oil that Venezuela has and the likely impact of our access to it especially as a new energy crisis looms in light of the demand for energy that is obviously inside of the AI revolution so we suddenly the battle is on and it is about energy and oil is clearly a big piece of that puzzle for now if you showed up maybe 10 years into building reactors oil wouldn't be such a big player but for the moment to soil and so from the point of view of the well-being of Americans I think that may end up being a strongly positive move whether or not it can be justified yep yeah I agree I think I just think we don't know this one yet we don't yeah um but but I'm still hopeful yep okay so that was uh three if I think five main points maybe it was six that I'm making here um oh yeah five four number four trump is taking counsel from truth speaking patriots specifically Kennedy and maha and uh I write you know Kennedy sees the death grip the big farm my big food and big hab hab and big egg have on the American people we've already talked about this but this is all moving in the right direction um the sway that the neocons and but this is that's not this point this is going to be the final point is this well I guess what I would just say is I see a tension there are a number of factions so let me just so true trump is taking counsel from truth speaking patriots yes yes he is and and um yes he is and we've seen really excellent um excellent changes a foot already my first point however trump is not owned I wrote trump is not the nominee for the republican party of old just as Kamala is not the nominee for the democratic party of old dig chanee is endorsed Kamala Harris and all the neocons are becoming democrats saying that trump has suffocated the soul of the GOP traditional power is scared and is concentrating in the modern democratic party trump doesn't answer to the power brokers of either party he is his own man and he is what you see is what you get I don't know if that was true when I wrote it I hope it was I don't think it is anymore and I think this to your point about the neocons the neocons switched again like they they clearly have sway well they are at this point I think they are clearly indifferent and agnostic to party go of course they have an agenda that point is wherever the power is they'll be there and have their their voice in the presidency here yep um but I do I do worry I think trump intended to be his own man yeah and that we don't know what happened there are ways in which he is still his own man but again in the idiom of negotiation I think it feels like somebody said the equivalent of Mr president congratulations well done there's certain things you can do there's certain things you can't and then I don't know what was said that gave that weight I mean I don't know that it was said at all but it feels that way there are certain places in which you know our belligerence with respect to Iran this was the no-new wars guy so what happened right the Epstein files why the turnaround so anyway yeah I think I think there's a ratio how free is this person and we don't know there are some places where he appears to be quite free and it's good and there's some places in which he appears not to be free and it's frightening I absolutely agree um so you know I stand by this piece that I wrote and I I very much prefer him to the alternative but my very first point in it which you know maybe it's ranked maybe not so five important points that I made and I think the very first one is the one that is least true Trump is not owned I wrote and again I don't know if what is true now and what was true then are different things but there is there are clear indications that he is not entirely his own man yeah I would say yeah it depends on your definition of owned yeah he's not he's not as free as he might be all right I had one last thing I wanted to connect the question that was raised by Higgseth regarding a a with the midterm elections as I did in my tweet on the subject okay there is a concern that whatever Higgseth is being spun up over and whatever the ultimate reason is that he's being spun up about this and he is spinning up the public make giving a very a cartoonish portrayal of what the 8a program is and why you know he's taking a sledgehammer to it there is a danger in his approach that could cost Trump his presidency literally and it has to do with the fact that the 8a program is overwhelmingly benefiting rural voters it is overwhelmingly it is a profound influence on the well-being of the state of Alaska and so in the sledge hammering or Higgsething or whatever it is the 8a program he could change the will of the electorate with respect to the Senate so it is very likely in the midterms that the Democrats will regain the House which means that they will impeach the president again with near certainty they can convict him if they don't have the Senate and so if Higgseth creates you know changes the will of Alaska changes the balance you know by empowering the urban centers and putting a finger in the eye of rural people veterans if he ends up costing Trump the Senate or the Republicans the Senate then it is very likely going to result in this president being removed from office and that is obviously a spectacular loss so what I urged in my tweet and what I urge now is for Secretary Higgseth to go look at the complete picture of what 8a is what the comparison is between fraud inside the 8a program and the rest of the defense budget and an honest reading will lead him somewhere very different than he is I'm not saying it doesn't need to be fixed but this is this is a mistake and it's a mistake based on a cartoon portrayal of this has yet more DEI when that is by far not the full story of the 8a program so anyway I've said my piece and that I think people need to pay attention to the fact that it is connected to the fate of the Senate which is connected to the fate of this presidency ultimately. Well on that happy note it's January and a bunch of you about to get thwacked by major storms and I hope I feel bad for those people I hope you do fine and that the grids don't go out and there's not too much accumulation of ISIS they are saying there might be in the south and the middle of the country. We will be back next week same time same place. Wait wait hold on it occurs to me that in light of what may be about to happen in the east and in the south and in the central state that we are going to have a confusion oh boy. Brewing. Okay. Because an ice storm could be a reference to immigration or it could be a reference to snapped power lines and broken trees. At the very least we should expect some good cartoons. Well I think for the next for the foreseeable weather future we should refer to a an ice storm that involves actual ice as an ice storm and an ice storm that involves immigration as a shits. Okay. That's a long way to go but there's something there. There is there is something there. Consider it amongst yourselves. Yeah. So check out our sponsors this week that's clear with an xxler and armra and crowd health and until you see us next time be good to the ones you love eat good food and get outside. Be well everyone.